I have to agree with hyoomik. The first picture is almost a prayer of thanksgiving for God's gifts of womanly beauty and the human reason that adorns it. The second is chocolate box stuff: bourgeois and house-proud.

Art is about 'defamiliarisation', as Shelley put it. ie The artist's job is to shake perception from complacency and make people see anew, more clearly. The modern world doesn't hate beauty. The second picture simpers-- it tells us nothing interesting, improving, or beautiful. Well, I've broken my own rule about commenting online. I shall hopefully not re-emerge.

Sally, I strongly contest your assertion about the purpose of art. If that's all it was, then the pile of bricks of the bag of excrement that are presented as art in places like the Tate Modern, would not be the utter rubbish we all know it to be.

And I will take my statement one step further: the modern world doesn't just hate beauty, it loves ugliness and disorder.

Every age has its dross, clichè and ineptitude, dear Hilary. But, I would assert, every age and every artist instinctively searches for truth. I sense in you an almost blind regard for all that is 'days of yore'. Most dangerous... Oh my word, here I am again. No more blogs! I have work to do. And I won't cvhange you Ms White. That is for sure...

To say that the purpose of art is only to "shake people up" is nothing more than modernity's excuse for its wanton mass destruction of everything good and true.

It reminds me of the excuse you hear from the "new" theologians. IN the '60s all you ever heard from these shysters was how one "must" question everything the Church taught. No reason was ever given. No one ever explained why one must "shake people out of their religious complacency". It was merely accepted that The Faith was out of date, and those who held it and were nourished by it were "complacent" and had to be shaken up.

The result was the virtual destruction of the visible Church and the abandonment of the Faith by millions. Millions of souls lost because of the absurd, faddish assumption that "shaking people out of their complacency" was always and everywhere a good idea.

No, I don't question the Church. That's what it means to be a Catholic.

And modernity's injunction to "shake things up" is or has been used as an excuse for mere indiscriminate iconoclasm and reflects its hatred of even the concept that there might be absolute Truth or transcendental realities. It does not bother it's tiny head with making any distinctions between bad things that need to be destroyed, or good things that need to be preserved and upheld. It merely destroys for the pleasure of knocking things down, like a child who likes to push over sand castles.

"Complacency" is merely a buzzword that is intended to create a negative emotional reaction in the hearer. You can use it like a gun, point it at, say, stained glass windows, and say, "That old stuff needs to come down, people are complacent about it". That's how the Revolution succeeded. People in the 60s and 70s were terrified of being seen to be uncool squares who loved beautiful things and believed in Truth, Goodness and Beauty. So down it all came.

Loving beautiful things often, but not necessarily, leads one to look to the past, since it is only there that these things were still honoured and desired.

There are, however, people, like the Traditionalists in the Church and the Classical Realist Revivalists in painting and sculpture, who turned their backs on the entire freakshow of Modernity, and have focused instead on searching for what is Real.

I remember listening to a performance of a modern piano sonata, with thousands of notes thrown about randomly, just piles of dissonance and ugliness, when a little miracle happened: the sustained sound of a major third, and it seemed at that moment the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.

There is so much garbage in what passes for "great" serious music. Give me Chopin, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky of course. Those guys knew about music!

A grotesquely unfair comparison. Despite their competent musicianship, Abba displayed little innovation or originality in their use of pop song format to compare to, say, Tchaikovsky's use of the celesta in "The Dance of Sugar Plum Fairy." In fact other than the opening glissando of "Dancing Queen" I cannot think of a single particularly "Abbaesque" musical or recording detail in their entire oeuvre. Chord progressions, lyrics, production, none of it says "Abba." Any Abba song could have been recorded by, say, the Carpenters or any other similar group with no loss and very little change. Tchaikovsky may be middlebrow but he is always himself. Perhaps we cannot compare him to Kate Bush or Prince, but Abba? He was more like the Duran Duran of his day, Miss White, you must admit despite your love for the one and disdain for the other. - Karen

The 1812 Overture, for instance, is a mostly a noisy medley of tunes his Russian audience knew already --- the Slavonic chant Спаси Господи, the Marseilleise, &c. Tchaikovsky himself hated it. He didn't much like The Nutcracker either. But I can't hear anything to object to in Iolanta, and there are movements, such as the Elegy from his Serenade or the Allegro con grazia of the Pathetique, that soar above the rest.

If Tchaikovsky was the musical dross of his time, which I doubt, there must have been something magical about where and when he was living.

Which is my theory about the lure of homosexuality. Imagine growing up as Chastity Bono with a mother like Cher. If you can't complete with what you think is the idea of femininity and SEXY! then you give up, gain weight and declare your freedom from the slavery of impossible conventions.

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